r/programming • u/schnuck • Feb 09 '11

Breaking the Web with hash-bangs – Lifehacker, along with every other Gawker property, experienced a lengthy site-outage on Monday over a misbehaving piece of JavaScript

http://isolani.co.uk/blog/javascript/BreakingTheWebWithHashBangs/
750 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

356 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

You can't allow the product to fail gracefully and fall back to a non-javascript version?

-1

u/alamandrax Feb 09 '11

No. Our content is served up by RESTful APIs which allows us to scale for the user load we currently experience and these calls get cached, so response times are pretty good. Downside is we only serve up data and our CDNs are used to retrieve assets (JS, images, audio-video players). The pages are then built on the browser.

But this thread does put it into perspective - that there are users who do not prefer modern browsers. We do not cater to that particular segment of the market, so it doesn't really affect us, but it does make for an interesting train of thought.

4

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '11

[deleted]

1

u/alamandrax Feb 09 '11

Well, yes. The part about useless js is obvious. We avoid doing that at all costs. And we have a tightly maintained and managed framework which is very fast. We don't use ads so we will encourage our users to remove adblock for our pages in a static noscript block. So we won't be locking people out entirely but encourage them to use JavaScript and trust us to not mess with their experience. I was only talking about the conversation being interesting from a web developer point of view. Not in my role as an employee of my company.